In August of 1994 I wrote a few very brief notes on a book I had just read (subsequently lost in the mail from a friend who borrowed it) called _The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating_ by David M. Buss (Basic Books, 1994). Since we had been on the topic of gender roles, I thought I might share this, even though it is a bit far from economics. It was quite interesting, though I'm not sure I agree with his conclusions (one of which is, if I remember correctly, that we really should not blame advertising for women being seen as "sex objects"). Buss uses what is called "evolutionary psychology" to explain the "mating" preferences of men and women. Basically, women, since they are more reproductively "valuable" than men and must invest much more in the gestation of a child, naturally "select" men which can provide them with a steady supply of resources. Men are looking for cues to reproductive capacity, which must be deduced indirectly, since human females have what is known as "cryptic" ovulation as compared our primate relatives. These cues are youth, health, and other "beauty" cues such as hip-size (actually, waist to hip ratio---.70 being about "ideal"), which provide fairly good estimates as to a woman's reproductive capacity. Buss gives some fairly sophisticated arguments for why humans select mates as they do. For example, he reasons that men prefer a hip ratio approaching .70 because a higher ratio mimics pregnancy, is correlated with diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, heart problems, and others. Lower ratios are correlated with earlier "pubertal endocrine activity," greater ease in becoming pregnant, greater ease in carrying and bearing a baby, etc. I was just wondering if anyone has read any of this stuff (either Buss, or evolutionary psychology in general) and if so, if they might provide some comments. Bill
